


a few stories

by thought



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-17
Updated: 2015-05-17
Packaged: 2018-03-30 23:11:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3955474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thought/pseuds/thought
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Around here, everyone has a story about summer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a few stories

Tucker remembers the summers as long stretches between school years. The hazy feeling of endless freedom lasted longer for him than it did for most kids, summers laid out in front of him like new worlds when he was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, when he could see the days on the calendar slipping past just like any others.

[[MORE]]

He remembers hot pavement burning through the soles of his cheap sneakers. Remembers water bans, and smog so thick nobody was allowed outside. He remembers getting sick off of stolen whisky in the back of his best friend's truck, week after week, and the dull over-heated pounding listlessness of the resulting hangover.

He remembers the revitalization project when he was four, nine, sixteen. Remembers watching historical vids in the air-conditioned library and walking out into streets that didn't look any different from five hundred years ago. He remembers standing in line for free icecream or protein bars or soda, not because they really needed it but because there was nothing else to do and the ladies who handed it out always looked like they were gonna pass out from the heat in their professional suits or church sweaters.

Tucker remembers his mom teaching him how to run from gangs, and his grandpa teaching him how to run from the police. He remembers not being very good at either. His grandma said he had too much time to get into trouble, but Tucker learned early on that sometimes getting into trouble meant standing at the wrong crosswalk at seven PM on a Wednesday. His grandma thought he should've started work at fifteen like most of the other kids in the neighbourhood, but his mom and grandpa said he wasn't gonna work before he absolutely had to. Factory City, that's what everybody called it. Nice work if you can get it, and if the chemicals and machinery didn't kill you first. Tucker's friends helped make fancy datapads and cars and guns that nobody in the city ever got to buy. Tucker spent his days walking the streets listening to music or in the library. He read a lot, even if he never talked about it. He learned a lot and sometimes that meant he learned when to keep his mouth shut, too.

He remembers being seventeen and stretched out on the roof of his girlfriend's apartment building, staring up at the stars. She was going up there after high school whether she liked it or not. Two years in the military for any kids unlucky enough to be in foster care.

"You should join up," she'd said, and Tucker laughed.

"You think I'm gonna be any good shooting at aliens? I'm a lover, not a fighter." Tucker's young enough that he doesn't remember a time when he wasn't at war. This is still true.

"Exactly," she'd said. "Maybe that's what the army needs."

*

Tucker says, "I had sex on the roof of an apartment building. It was kinda gross, but she was totally into it. Summer was great."

*

Carolina remembers the rainstorms best, probably because they were so rare. She remembers sitting out on the deck in her shorts and her thinnest tshirt and letting the rain wash away all the dust and sweat of Texan summer. The thunder crashed like cannonfire and the lightning lit up the fields in all directions in a stark white glow so she could see for miles.

She remembers her mom came home mostly in the summer. Remembers playing on the swings and camping in the woods and going to the local swimming pool. Her mom coming home was like a tiny vacation from real life, filled with adventures and stories and 'Oh let her stay up late, Leonard, it's not like she's got school in the morning,' and 'Just one more popsicle, dad doesn't have to know.'

Her mom came home like she was visiting an amusement park, kissed her dad hard and laughed too loud at his nerdy jokes, beamed down at Carolina like she was the most exciting thing she'd seen all year. Looking back, Carolina's pretty sure her mom never knew the names of any of Carolina's friends, or what she liked best in school, or what project her dad was working on. Looking back, Carolina's not sure if that was such a bad thing.

Summers after Allison died were filled with science camp and soccer camp and extra-credit classes. Whatever her dad could push her into to keep her out of his hair. Carolina can't say she minded-- she had more energy than she knew what to do with, and by age nine her competitive streak was well on its way to the intensity of her adult obsessive drive for perfection. Carolina's father grew more and more distant and Carolina replaced his affection with gold star stickers and A+s and first place ribbons.

She remembers every July 4th, hours of shared silence in the car with her father to hours of awkward silence perched on a lawn chair at her grandfathers' garden party while the old men made disparaging comments about her mother's class and career path and her father's parenting skills. She thinks in her teenaged years this was the only few hours each year that she and her father were in absolute agreement on everything.

By the time she was sixteen the seasons barely registered. Summer was just as filled with classes and sports and work and volunteering as any other season, and Carolina powered through it all with the gritty buzz of chemicals in her blood and the itchy sense of panic in her head. She graduated in January, six months ahead of most of her peers. The rest of the advanced class wanted to go on holiday to celebrate. It's always summer somewhere. Carolina remembers the resort on Luna in patches, everything too loud and too bright and too sharp. She remembers dancing all night and being up to run mile after mile early each morning, remembers swimming laps in the pool and studying the politics after hearing a debate on the news in a coffeeshop.

She remembers coming home, passing her father in the front hall as he rushed out the door with a briefcase and a carry-on. She's still almost certain he hadn't even realized she'd been gone. It was the last time she saw him for six years, and by the next time, sitting across from him at a cafe in the chilly summer on one of the outer colonies, she fresh out of basic training and he three months away from receiving his first military contract, she was able to shake his hand over coffee like one adult to another. The next four years they saw each other like vacations, and Carolina knows it wasn't such a bad thing.

*

"I went on holiday to Luna after I graduated high school," Carolina says. "Three weeks of dance clubs and drinking by the pool. Summer was great."

*

Summer's on Chorus are a living thing. Hot and sticky and humid like walking through tepid bath water. Vanessa spent summers when she was young at her aunt and uncle's house in one of the small mountain towns, where the lakes were clear and cold and the air was thin. Later, after her parents were out of the picture and her aunt and uncle had moved in to central Armonia, she went on a class trip out to those same mountains. The air smelled strange, and a lot of the trails had been blocked off because of instabilities caused by mining. The lakes she remembered swimming in as a child glowed an unnatural blues and greens, artificial and sick against the warm tans and reds of the rock. Her teacher said it was the plantlife, but when Vanessa looked it up on the net everyone said it was radiation. She couldn't imagine what could cause that kind of radiation, what could transform the landscape so quickly. She had nightmares about radiation poisoning the entire summer she was sixteen.

When Vanessa first showed an interest in politics her aunt and uncle tried to convince her to go on an internship program off-world. Vanessa refused. She knew how expensive the internships were, and she also knew how many kids conveniently disappeared while on one of the inner worlds. She appreciated the offer of a way out, but Chorus was her home and she understood enough of the news broadcasts and pamphlets she picked up on park benches and at rallies that she knew she wanted to stay and fight for it. She knew something was happening-- it was no coincidence that the kids who were vanishing from the internship programs were mostly the children of politicians and well-off families. Old money. Vanessa read her history books like everyone else, she knew about the jatis, knew that even if nobody thought about it any more, on Chorus a name like Vanessa says as much as Oksana or Kavana. But this is something different, for as much as she could draw parallels. Her aunt and uncle held meetings in their kitchen when they thought she was asleep, and the first time Vanessa heard the phrase "New republic" she realized what the meetings were about.

She went to university as a recruiter as much as a student. She talked to people in her poli-sci classes, challenged professors blatantly and often with no regard for her continued academic success. She read as much as she could get her hands on in the libraries, and went around at night tacking up the fliers that her aunt printed out on their tiny home printer.

She had a job over the summers in an icecream shop where the owners were helping to send money out to the slowly forming rebel military in the mountains. Vanessa handed out cones wrapped in paper with times and coordinates written on the inside and felt like she was at the centre of the action, like she was really making a difference. She felt untouchable.

Her aunt and uncle disappeared on a muggy, stormy day in late summer. Vanessa came back to the house to find their windows smashed, their belongings strewn across the floor, half-eaten plates of sabji gone cold on the kitchen table. That's the same summer she leaves for the mountains.

*

"I sold icecream over the summers," Vanessa says. "We had fifty-one different flavours, it was a lot of fun. Summers were great."

*

All of these stories are true.


End file.
